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Prosocial Relationships and the Psychopath … A Chess Game Without the Use of Rooks

These are strange times. The young woman, that I mentioned in this post, and I have hit it off well enough and I find that I am, as a result, stuck in limbo. My ennui is at fever pitch. She is neurotypical and demands my good behavior, which is not an unreasonable request. However, I ache. I don’t want to be impotent for the duration of this relationship. I want to maintain the ability to be callous and cunning, manipulative and powerful, but I recognize that my sins are a burden to her. Not that I want to make her a target of such behaviors, but I don’t believe that I want to be strictly prosocial in all areas. I preach restraint, but in reality, I’m advocating relative restraint for the psychopath. We still have that niche that we fill and there are still behaviors that are strictly adaptive in a world of prosocials. Giving that advantage up entirely is madness.

I’m not sure that I can win. Yes, our relationship is unique in that she knows of my psychopathy because of my ubiquitous presence on this blog and in social media, but I’m not sure I could live such a proposed duality even if she did not know. Psychopaths, even the best of us, tend to color outside the lines. We do not have 100% self control. We cannot be strictly antisocial nor prosocial as there are advantages to utilizing each set of strategies. It would be akin to trying to win a chess game without using bishops or rooks: technically possible, but highly improbable.

Most relationships, for anyone prosocial or otherwise, fail. The odds are at fever pitch for the psychopath, however. We may be charming and relentlessly possessive (and protective), but we will always be tempted to honor our pasts. Relationships bring rigidity that the psychopath is woefully underprepared for. We can fight our natural proclivities and see a world of the unimodal, picking strict antisocial behavior or prosocial behavior, but ultimately such rigidity harms us more than helps. It leaves us in limbo and eats away at our potency.